The phrase "smart growth" sometimes causes eye-rolling, as it is a perhaps too-flexible concept often appropriated by private interests as a marketing tool rather than an organizing principle for new development. Every new shopping center is a "smart growth" development, every new building a "town center" even where there is no town around it.
But in a purer form, Louisiana is going to get a heavy dose of smart growth if the Louisiana Speaks regional plan is embraced by residents and policymakers.
Smart growth is about molding development patterns in a host of ways, changing from the excessively automobile-centric subdivisions of the post-World War II era. In their place, there is a more creative vision of communities that provide alternatives to the automobile - transit or bicycling or just old-fashioned walking around - and promote mixed-use development. The latter allows people to live, work and play in closer proximity than in the past, in a denser urban fabric than in many sprawling cities.
That's a lot wrapped into a phrase, but it is the guiding principle of the land-use patterns envisioned in the Louisiana Speaks regional plan for south Louisiana's future.
The planners who developed the proposal - at - said that people recognized in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita that Louisiana cannot go on building in areas vulnerable to storms.
Residents want to shift "development patterns toward reinvesting in existing cities and towns, building communities that are more compact and walkable, and creating places with more transit options and a broader mix of housing types," the planners said. "Louisianians also expressed a clear understanding that our patterns of growth directly influence the resilience of our communities."
The plan is, more prosaically, a way to save money during the coming decades, lead planner Peter Calthorpe said. Sprawling development increases the cost of public services from roads to sewers to schools and libraries, he said. Sprawl also has resulted in more development of flood-prone low-lying land.
And as the plan notes, smart growth policies "would begin to redress persistent disinvestment and inequality in parts of many Louisiana cities and towns."
If this sounds too "left coast" for Louisiana, the boosters of the plan say it is not. They said the plan would embrace incentives for developers and property owners to do the right thing, whether it's conservation easements to prevent high-risk building on flood plains, or tax breaks for "infill" developments in urban areas.
Louisiana is a "fierce property rights state," noted Louisiana Recovery Authority board member Sean Reilly. The shift in development patterns envisioned by the plan would not be "heavy-handed," he said.
The plan does not declare war on traditional subdivisions, Calthorpe said. National trends show that tomorrow's society will require more of a mix of single-family homes with townhouses and condominiums. That is about making a city's population density greater, but it's mostly about meeting the demands of a changing marketplace, he said. "By diversifying, you actually make it denser because the trend in this country has been so strong in one direction," Calthorpe said.
While smart growth requires engaging the private sector into more efficient and sustainable patterns of growth, government does have a role in putting its dollars - especially capital investment, such as new buildings, roads and mass transit - behind the plan's vision. "The state has to step up to the plate and regulate itself first, and it will," said Donna Fraiche, an LRA board member.
The irony in the whole discussion: Louisiana has a heritage of smart growth.
The older parts of New Orleans were built on higher ground; that's what risk management was about in the 1700s. People lived and worked, and interacted with each other more richly in that environment; today, this is called the New Urbanist philosophy of town planning. Louisiana's plantation homes and urban courtyards were built with porches and ventilation to deal with a subtropical climate; in today's jargon, that is "green" building in consonance with the environment.
Our future has creative examples all around us from our past.
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